“We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius,” observes Lev Grossman. “It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.” In an insightful and provocative essay for Time magazine — where he’s the book editor — Grossman considers what the current circumstances might imply for the future of not just the book, but the novel in particular, and predicts: “[M]ore books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture.”

As for what that fiction will look like: “Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer — electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints — and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.” And, Grossman stresses, “None of this is good or bad; it just is.”